Welcome to The Gravestone Project, a collaborative digital humanities endeavor that seeks to collect and explore data related to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century graveyard cultures in the United Kingdom (including colonial Britain) and the United States, with a special focus on the connections between graveyards and the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

We have just published the first edition of Grave Notes, which contains short scholarly essays on a range of topics related to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century graveyard cultures. If you would like to submit an abstract to be considered for inclusion in our second issue, please see our Call for Contributions, which is located on the Grave Notes page, and contact Chris Washington (chris.washingtondc100@gmail.com) for more information.

Our broader goals include

Collecting images of cemeteries and gravestones in the United Kingdom and the United States that date to 1900 or earlier, as well as images of British colonial cemeteries and gravestones

Gathering a searchable visual and text archive of epitaphs from before 1900

Gathering a visual archive of gravestone iconography and engraving from before 1900

Collecting images of gravestones and memorials related to literary figures

Researching the literary significance of specific gravestones, graveyards, and epitaphs

We hope that this data will enrich scholarship and classrooms at all levels. You may read more about our agenda on our Project Origins & Objectives page.